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Welcome to Dump Go Daddy Day.

I’ve moved my domain registrations over to Namecheap. Today only, for every domain transfer, they’re donating $1 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and their fight against SOPA.  If you’re interested in becoming one of their customers, I’d love if you’d use the following affiliate link:

Background

I think it was 2006 when a couple of other podcasters contacted me to say they had bought domain names for me. At that time, my blog websites were hosted at Blogger, and this allowed me to be able to give my audience a simpler name. And it’s more professional.

I’d heard of Go Daddy‘s endorsement of podcasting through their various agreements with other networks, as many of the shows I’d listen to became affiliates. I’ve used coupon codes to register and renew domains over the years.

Sleaze Happens

Then they started to get sleazy.  By that I mean that their online and Super Bowl ads told me that they were targeting a market that I really had no interest in being a part of.  What’s ironic is that Bob Parsons, who founded Go Daddy, also had a company called Parsons Technology, which made the QuickVerse Bible software, which we bought with our first home computer 12 years ago.

I began moving my domain registrations elsewhere. I had some domains coming up for renewal next month and had planned to move them when they were closer to expiring.

The SOPA/PIPA Thing

I’m not even going to claim I know enough about it to be an expert (I’ve included links to related stories below, however.). The US Congress has been discussing legislation to further deal with online piracy. I don’t believe that piracy is good, but I think that the way Congress is trying to deal with it through this new legislation is a bad solution.

Among those businesses to have come out in support of SOPA/PIPA, Go Daddy was one of them.  This led to many of its customers deciding to leave them in mass exodus. Today, December 29, 2011, is being known in many circles as “Dump Go Daddy Day”. (Go Daddy has since removed their explicit support in response to all the outcry to try to save some face.)

This was the rest of the motivation I needed to leave them.

So I’ve now moved my domain registrations over to Namecheap and have become an affiliate myself. And, as I said earlier, today only, for every domain transfer, they’re donating $1 to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and their fight against SOPA.  So if you’re interested in becoming one of their customers, I’d love if you’d use the following link:

Related articles

• GoDaddy boycott over piracy views (bbc.co.uk)
• Stupid GoDaddy Deserves Boycott (forbes.com)
• Namecheap to Donate $1 to EFF for Every Domain Transfer on December 29 (elliotsblog.com)
• December 29 is ‘Dump GoDaddy Day’ (digitaltrends.com)
• Angry geeks fire back at SOPA supporters (rt.com)
• Anti-SOPA activists find ways to keep the Internet free (promoteliberty.wordpress.com)

Everyone has a story

Anthony Marco recently gave a talk at the PAB2011 conference in Ottawa, Canada in which he talks about The Unattended Moment in the Communication Jam. He describes it like this:

• When you realize the act of communication distinguishes itself from the message.
• When, during the delivery of the message, you recognized a moment of authenticity, skill, or method as paramount to the content.
• When someone else’s story becomes yours, as you get the sense that you have become part of the performance, too.

This happens a lot during concerts, conferences, and movies, as well as many other situations.

I am so grateful for many Unattended Moments that I’ve experienced recently. For instance:

• At church four women didn’t have the accompaniment track for “Blessed and Highly Favored,” which they were performing in the coming week. I find a YouTube clip and they practice in the A/V room as I produce and upload other content. I have to stop what I’m doing because the harmonies resonate so powerfully that I get shivers. Who am I that I get to enjoy this experience before everyone else?
• My daughter and I attend the premiere of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt 2, the last installment of the series. The cinema is decked out with posters and other memorabilia. People have come, dressed up in costume. Everyone is there to celebrate the moment. As my daughter and I sit in the front row for the 3D movie, we can almost reach out and touch the action.
• At nearly every New Media Cincinnati Second Saturday event I’ve organized or facilitated, when I look around at faces old and new and see just how important this is to the community.
• This past month at every church service, when it came time to help project the media to the screen in support of whomever is speaking. I stretched to figure out how to get video and graphics up to the audience, often making it happen at the last minute.  Partly just to see if it could be done, but mostly because I want the story to be told.

I rejoice and long for more of those unattended moments, and I’m especially humbled when I’m able to do something to help make them happen.

Cover via Amazon

You… are a professional communicator, parent, family member, teacher, friend, or just someone who wants what you say to be remembered. But, you ask, how do you do that, exactly?

MADE TO STICK

In their book Made to Stick (affiliate link), brothers Chip and Dan Heath describe their journey of analyzing messages that have stuck with us. They looked at urban legends, proverbs, and other forms of communication that people across history have been able to remember.

They have been able to identify six characteristics of messages that persist. They even came up with a handy, sticky acronym to help us remember them: the SUCCESs.

Let’s look at these elements and find ways to make our messages memorable, whether they are blog posts, announcements, instructions, or even words on a cover letter or resume.

SIMPLE

Simple messages are not dumbed-down or made stupid. They hit the core of the matter. In the military, the commanding officer does not need to tell the entire unit how to get to the top of the hill before sundown, he just tells them to do it. That’s the core of his message – it’s simple and easy to understand.

Not like some company mission or vision statements, unfortunately.

Complete this proverb: “A bird in the hand is worth _____.”*

You know the answer because it’s a proverb. Again, simple doesn’t mean dumbed-down – it’s got the complexity removed from it.

Twitter is a great tool to help us with this. Can you get your point across in 140 characters or less? If not, then forget about it.

UNEXPECTED

Was the title of this post a bit provocative? In January, the New Media Cincinnati social media networking group held a panel discussion about online. We wanted to get people’s attention. So we came up with the title: “Naked on the Web! How’s YOUR Privacy?” It got a lot of attention.

Our messages need that dash of unexpectedness in order to get attention and be memorable. Think about the urban legend about the guy waking up in an icy bathtub with his kidneys removed. That’s unexpected!

CONCRETE

In order to make our messages clearly understood, we need them to be concrete. When we start talking about how many calories we need in our diet, the number doesn’t mean anything. But show us how much food that is, and we’ll understand. The President can talk about removing $100 million from the US budget, and that seems like a lot of money (it is, relatively speaking). But compare that with the total national budget with a nice graphic visual, and it makes more sense to us.

After the earthquake in Haiti last year, we were given the ability to send a text message and donate $10 to help the cause. Breaking it down in a simple, concrete way, makes it easy to remember and act on.

CREDIBLE

Our messages need to be believable in order for them to be remembered. Doctors and other medical professionals have some built-in credibility by nature of their profession. In some cases, we need to borrow from someone else’s credibility as we share our message.

And sometimes, the average person can have credibility himself or herself. Remember Clara Peller’s character in the Wendy’s “Where’s the Beef?” commercials? She was able to say what we all wanted to say, and that gave the message its credibility.

EMOTIONAL

For our messages to be memorable, they need to hit us emotionally. This is one reason, why, when we see PSAs asking us to help out impoverished areas of the world, they tell the story of a single individual and what our donations would do to help him or her.

Our individual messages may inspire compassion, outrage, guilt, anger, resentment, or any other emotions. I’ve noticed over time that some of the most popular posts I’ve written over here are those that get the biggest emotional response from others.

STORY

Weave all as many of these elements as possible into a story, and chances are we’ll have a sticky message. We remember stories more easily. Children love to be told stories – Aesop’s fables have remained popular over the years. So have the parables that Jesus told.

I encourage you to read Made to Stick. You can get a copy from the affiliate link here, check it out from your public library, or, like my friend Andy did, borrow a copy from someone else. Our SUCCESs in communicating a message that will be remembered by others depends on how many of these elements are in them.

Make them sticky!

Related articles

• Made to Stick Learning (eideneurolearningblog.blogspot.com)
• When you communicate – are you memorable? (psychologytoday.com)
• Leadership Hall of Fame: Dan Heath, Coauthor of “Made to Stick” (fastcompany.com)

Geez. It’s October already.

For three years now, I’ve been organizing events for the in-person social networking community I founded called New Media Cincinnati. We actually have the October event coming up this weekend.

My approach in getting the word out about these events has changed over time, from sending multiple direct messages to followers, to using Facebook as the medium to plan and organize the events.  For awhile we even had a wiki set up. I thought I’d share some of  my current approach to getting the word out.

An approach to event marketing

In 2008, I began using Eventbrite to organize, plan, and run the monthly events, which have become known as New Media Cincinnati Second Saturdays (mostly because people always wondered when we met). I’ve enjoyed using Eventbrite, and I’m not ashamed to recommend them (and for you to use my affiliate link!).

One of the main reasons for using a system like this is just to know who is planning on coming to events and having an easy way to follow up with them.  Over the years I’ve understood that it’s important to have a database. As Chris Brogan says, “you live and die by your database.”

Past attendees. For New Media Cincinnati, part of that database is the list of past attendees — registrants, actually, since not everyone who registers always attends.

E-mail signup list. People would also contact me to ask if they could be invited to future events.  Instead of wrangling multiple emails to make sure people got their invitations, I set up the New Media Cincinnati E-mail Sign-up List. I’ve also added it to the New Media Cincinnati Facebook page. I make sure people on this list get an invitation.

E-mail subscribers to the blog. When I set up the New Media Cincinnati website, I added a way for people to sign up to receive updates at the website via e-mail through FeedBurner. Some of these people may or may not already be connected to the group through one of the many other touchpoints, so I make sure to invite these people.

Cincinnati-area LinkedIn connections. The main reason I founded New Media Cincinnati is to take connections made online into the real world. Over time, another reason is to help promote digital literacy in the community. It’s so easy to make connections, and I think that New Media Cincinnati events are a great opportunity for me to re-connect in-person with people in the Cincinnati area I know through LinkedIn.

I’ll leave the mechanics of how this all comes together for another time.  One thing I will say is that Eventbrite definitely helps keep track of the status of invitations, including responses from people who say they are not interested or have otherwise unsubscribed from these types of communications.

As well as those who are.

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I’ve been looking at analytics data for my websites for weeks now and have been puzzled by some of the numbers. It’s great to have the numbers, but I’ve had a feeling that I wasn’t getting the whole picture.  I’m not sure why the numbers are the way they are, and I’ve wished there was some way to understand what visitors to the site are thinking. Are they finding what they’re looking for? Are they satisfied?

Avinash Kaushik is the Analytics Evangelist at Google, and he’s teamed with folks at iPerceptions to put together something that can help understand the behavior of website visitors better. The video below explains it well.

An Introduction To 4Q: Now Be Truly Customer Centric!

I’m beginning to roll this very short survey out on some of my sites.

For the longest time, people keep asking about the ROI (Return on Investment) of social media. I remember in a Community Chat on Friendfeed a few months ago, Olivier Blanchard mentioned he needed to put together a Basics of Social Media ROI presentation to share. While browsing the Marketing Over Coffee website, I noticed they linked back to it.

Here’s Olivier’s presentation from Slideshare:

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• A Shocking Failure of Protocol (marketingovercoffee.com)
• MoC Extra: Interview with Mitch Joel (marketingovercoffee.com)

My friend and independent musician Drew LaPlante likes to use the phrase, “It’s a beautiful thing.” I could say that about Twitter and Twitter search.

Using Twitter Search to track trends

One way I use Twitter is to track the presence of certain phrases over time. I subscribe to the RSS feeds for searches in Google Reader and let them sit for at least 30 days.  I’m not as much interested in the content of the individual Twitter updates(tweets) as the aggregated information. I find this exercise to be instructive in understanding trends.

What’s being said and how I might help

I had thought of doing this to identify opportunities to promote the How I Got My Job job-hunting success stories podcast. My original hypothesis was that people might be more interested in knowing about the series right when they’ve lost their jobs.

Understanding the stories data can tell

In all the data analysis I’ve ever done at work and in other projects, to better understand the stories data tell, I’ve realized it’s vital to check and verify the underlying data, and make sure assumptions are clear. That way I and others can make better business decisions.

Analyzing Twitter search trends definitely comes with a caveat.  Take this snapshot of Twitter search data, as shown by day of the week, for example:

This chart shows that, over the past 30 days, the phrases “just lost my job” and “lost my job today” have showed up on the Twitter public timeline on Wednesday the most.  Does this mean that more people are losing their jobs on Wednesdays the most? Maybe, but you cannot be sure from this visual alone.

Why? Because aggregate information like this, a gross overview of the presence of phrases or terms, ignores context. What does “just lost my job” mean to you? Does it mean today? Last week? A couple weeks ago? What about those who do not report their job loss on Twitter with these words?

Even so, Twitter search trend analysis like this is instructive to know that people are talking about losing jobs, and it identifies opportunities to share about the series.

The visual above shows the same Twitter search data over the past 30 days, but in this case by time of day. The orange bar shows what time I’ve marked the items as read in Google Reader and can be ignored.  The chart indicates more people mentioning “lost my job today” or “just lost my job” in the afternoon or evening, perhaps, after coming home from their last day of work.

How I use the data

So, what does this mean for me? It seems that promoting the show on Twitter in the afternoon would perhaps reach the largest audience that might be most receptive, and maybe doing this on Wednesday would be best.  I still need to find a way to measure whether these efforts are successful, and this could be done by checking web analytics.

What say you?

I don’t claim that this approach is without flaws, and would love to see how it could be improved.  I would like to better track the effectiveness of promotions and welcome your thoughts.  What do you think of this approach?  What would you do differently? Have you ever taken a similar approach?

April 13, 2001 UPDATE: Christopher Penn shares some additional insight into timing Twitter updates that you should read. Check out “When is the best time to tweet?”

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• Using Google Reader As A Twitter Search Engine (philbaumann.com)
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I’ve been taking an Essentials of Advertising and Marketing Communications course (aka MKT 395) from Arizona State University via iTunes U for a few months now.  iTunes U has the course from Winter semester 2008.  I’ve been listening to the lectures on my commute from Cincinnati to Dayton for a few months now.  Although I won’t get credit for the course in terms of a degree, I am taking the course via iTunes U for the experience.

Assignments

Dr. Vincent Blasko gave the class three assignments before the first exam, to be double-spaced on a single sheet of paper.  I will be completing the assignments through posts to this blog.  The first three assignments were as follows:

1. Service Encounter. Describe a service encounter you recently experienced, whether a good or bad one.  Describe what made it so.
2. Detective. Pick someone you’ve seen in public.  Describe him or her.  What kind of clothes does he or she wear? What is in his or her shopping cart?  What kinds of activities do you think this individual enjoys? Pick a product or service you think you could sell that person.
3. Super Bowl. Pick a commercial that ran during the Super Bowl.  What was the strategy (if you could figure it out)? How was the strategy executed?

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